Schedule and Expectations,
Presentations
Mobility, Neoliberalism, and
Worlds in Motion: Play, Travel
and Knowing
Foucault
Appadurai (+ Yasmeen)
Valentine & Holloway
+ Michele, de Castell & Jenson
Plan about 15 minutes of Presentation, Bring your Top three Questions, Make
good use of your peers to get feedback, and pull apart conceptual problems -your unhelpfully grey areas….
Mary
Paulina
Linda
Michele
Dai
Pearl
Rachel
Indira
Yasmeen
Valerie
Jocelyne
Gordon
Mobility, Neoliberalism, and
Worlds in Motion: Play,
Travel and Knowing
Foucault and Subjectivity.
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A History and Critique of Reason.
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Foucault in this tradition.
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Examines historical circumstances that
gave rise to the modern type of
person.
Madness, Punishment, Government,
and Sexuality and subjectivity.
Linked to his history of the subject is a
history and critique of reason.
Critique of the ‘Enlightenment’
Knowledge as a new form of power.
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Knowledge, for Foucault,
doesn’t develop in a vacuum.
Inextricably linked to
emergence of institutions.
Knowledges involve doing
things with bodies.
They invade the selfdetermination of the
individual body.
Power of rational expert
invades/ moulds/ shapes the
individual body
Governmentality, Science, Knowledge
and Power.
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Statistics - make it possible to
think in an entirely new way .
Government impossible without
statistics.
Counting, classifying and
recording of people
People and populations a new
object of analysis and
manipulation.
Sociology can be conceived of as
part of this tradition.
For Foucault the state is not a
thing - a single centre of power- it
is the accumulation of many
centres of governmental
expertise.
Technologies of the Self.
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Normalisation through sexuality one aspect of a wider process
that Foucault calls the
development of “technologies of
the self”.
Great projects of objectification,
knowledge and normalisation
turned inwards into a project of
self mastery, self discipline and
self control.
A “technology of the self”.
An historical shift in the nature of
social identities.
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Pre-modern identities emphasise membership of
collectivities
Modern forms of identity emphasise the importance of
the subjects ability to articulate and reflect upon
private experience.
Issues & Questions Raised by reading
Foucault.
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How are we merely products of an exercise of power
that we don’t always recognise?
Are we better off for this discipline?
Power is not just something that represses.
Power produces things, it produces the insane, it
produces, the delinquent, it produces sexuality, and it
produces the ‘free’, ‘rational’ subject.
The Enlightenment linkage between knowledge,
removal of power, and emancipation - that runs
through German Idealism, Marxism, the Frankfurt
School and so on - is broken.
What’s left? (of ‘agency’, ‘subjectivity’…)
Ubiquitous mobility
Everyone it seems has the ability to be mobile and
networked these days, even some groups who we do
not typically associate with mobility
Read the article ‘Call to give the homeless
broadband’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4396372.stm
How do you think that social exclusion is impacted by
being on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide’?
You may have heard of the ‘wandering scribe’, a
homeless women living in her car whose blog has found an
international audience
Read about her in the article ‘Park and write’ by Sean
Coughlin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4923488.stm
“It's a tale of our time - about being cut off from
everything around you but still connected to people
thousands of miles away”
Liz Jensen’s (2001) novel The Paper Eater begins thus:
‘If there’s one thing to be said about life in captivity, it’s
that you get to travel.’ This sentence juxtaposes two
images that don’t normally go together: prisoners and
mobility
Recently, it has come to light that the US has been
sending terrorist suspects to be interrogated in countries
where torture is often used on prisoners (so-called
‘rendition flights’)
Read the article ‘CIA jails allegations’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/44957
30.stm
Networks, flows and mobility
Networks, flows, and mobility are some of the most
important ideas associated with globalization, and some of
the biggest themes right now in the social sciences
Today, we will focus on three theoretical approaches:
 Manuel Castells’ work on network society
 Arjun Appadurai’s work on scapes and flows
 John Urry’s work on mobility
Castells on globalization
For Castells, networks are a key feature of globalization. Networks
have no centre, but consist of nodes and linkages.
A world of nation-states (space of places) has been replaced by a
world of networks (space of flows)
Dominant networks are those of global capital, management, and
information
The ‘network state’ is the response of political systems to the challenges
of globalization. The European Union may be the clearest
manifestation of this emerging form of state (Castells 2000; 364)
Read an excellent interview with
Castells entitled ‘Identity and
change in the network society’
Parts 4,5,6 of the interview are
most relevant to this lecture
The interview can be found at:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/
Castells/castells-con0.html
Castells on
‘network society’
Castells on the ‘network society’
Read a short essay by Castells on ‘The
network society’ at:
www.jmk.su.se/global99/carin/netwsoc.html
“The network society is a capitalist society.
This brand of capitalism is different from its
historical predecessors. It is global and it is
structured around a network of financial
flows”
Urry on mobility
John Urry argues that the idea of ‘society’ is no longer as useful as it
once was
Trans-national networks and the flows of people, money, and
information mean that it is mobility that we should be studying
He looks at the example of airports: “increasingly air terminals are
becoming like cities, and in the ‘frisk society’ cities are becoming like
airports” (Urry, 2004: 32)
What do you think he means by the ‘frisk society’?
Read Urry’s article on ‘new mobilities’ at
www.sfb536.mwn.de/veranstaltungen/B3_Workshop_0104_Dokumentation.pdf
Why staying at home is the new going out
Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 77) says that ‘nowadays we are all
on the move’
We are on the move even when we are at home;
‘we are glued to our chairs and zap the cable or
satellite channels … jumping in and out of foreign
spaces with a speed much beyond the capacity of
supersonic jets and cosmic rockets, but nowhere
staying long enough to be more than visitors’
Do you think he is suggesting that too much mobility means
that we are never really at home?
Appadurai is best known for the idea
of ‘scapes’ outlined in his essay
‘Disjuncture and difference in the
global cultural economy’ (Appadurai,
1990)
Under conditions of globalization
economy, culture, and politics can no
longer exist in unity, as they did within
the nation-state
You can read an except on this theme
by Appadurai at:
www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/~holden/MediatedSociety/R
eadings/2003_04/Appadurai.html
To Yasmeen’s .ppt/facilitation
Arjun
Appadurai
Valentine and Holloway: Overview
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Valentine and Holloway weave together an examination of how
on-line and off-line worlds are integrated and interdependent in
young people’s lives. The relationship between these spaces is
often posed in a zero/sum game in which time spent with the
former detracts from and reduces young people’s engagements
with the latter. They suggest this simplifies the way young people
move back and forth between these spaces and the
interdependencies between each realm. Centrally, the article is
an challenge to those who are either simplistic boosters or
detractors about the role of ICTs in children’s lives. To take one or
the other of these positions, they argue, is to interpret ICTs in
terms of older narratives that have typically surrounded the
development of new technologies. This underestimates the way
ICTs are used and absorbed into students’ lives and the way such
technologies might act as a catalyst for change.
Utopian/Dystopian Thinking
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A great deal of utopian thinking surrounded the
early development of ICTs.
In conjunction with this, fear-mongering suggested
potential threats from this technology
Children are at the centre of these debates
The Problem
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Little is still known about how children actually
employ ICTs within the context of their everyday
lives
Because children remain relatively underresearched and there are few empirical studies of
people’s actual use of ICTs
Boosters
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Delivers users from constraints of physical bodies/material
limitations, offering users utopian possibilities “to create and
play with on-line identities” (304)
Creates new forms of social relationships that are potentially
global in reach. This allows for the development of more
genuine relationships because they are formed on the basis
of “genuine interests”
It is a hyperrealization of the real – all the best features are
accelerated and made easier to access – “a zone of freedom,
fluidity, and experimentation that is insulated from the
mundane external realities of the material world” (304)
Detractors
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The virtual is a bad imitation of the real world – disembodied
identities are “inauthentic” and on-line communication is
commodified, privatized and individualized in contrast to the
more “communal” forms of face-to-face communication
(304).
Invites people to become detached from the social world,
removed from full human experiences
Children in particular are threatened; they turn away from the
“real”, withdraw from social life and social space
The “real” is a fragile world under threat from the “lure of the
‘virtual’” (304)
Theoretical Framework
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Premised on a rejection of the real/virtual and the
booster/detractor dichotomies
Working with a dialectic of technology where humans are
understood to be “inextricably entwined with our material
surroundings, to the point that we need to recast the social to
include nonhumans” (306).
This principle underlies Actor Network Theory where “society
is produced in and through patterned networks of
heterogeneous materials in which the properties of humans
and nonhumans are not self-evident but rather emerge in
practice” (306) See my example of film and vision in our
online discussion.
Theoretical Frame C’ont
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Computers are envisioned as things “that
materialize for children as diverse social practices
… [W]e recognize that computers may play
different roles within children’s different
communities of practice and so emerge as very
different tools, depending on the way different
communities of practice make use of them.”
The Study
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ICTs allow children “to reconfigure their social relationships and
identities in on-line spaces” (313).
The anonymity of virtual spaces allows children to produce on-line
spaces separate from their off-line worlds.
But off-line worlds still impact on-line identities. In fact, these
identity spaces are interconnected.
Suggest four ways children incorporate off-line into on-line worlds:
children’s on-line identities directly re-present off-line
selves and activities
 even when children make up new identities on-line
these often depend on off-line identifies and
communities
 on-line identity worlds reproduce class/gender
relations
 economic and temporal realities limit affect how kids
can be on-line
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The Study II
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Children’s virtual worlds are incorporated into their real
worlds because:
 Children
use on-line activities to maintain and
reconfigure distant and local off-line
relationships/friendships.
 Kids use ICTs to find info about their off-line
hobbies and interests
 Kids talk on-line about their off-line interests and
make “virtual” friends
 Participation with ICTs can reconfigure kids off-line
identities in positive and negative ways.
Conclusion
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“[T]he Internet-connected PC does not have any
inherent properties or universal impacts. Rather, it
emerges as a very different tool for different groups
of children in what we might call … ‘communities of
practice’” (316)
The term ‘scapes’ indicates that the
cultural flows that Appadurai is talking
about are ‘perspectival constructs’
rather than fixed relations
Flows and scapes impact on people in
different ways
Different actors (governments,
businesses, individuals) will have
different perceptions of their place
within global processes
What are
‘scapes’?
According to Appadurai there are five ‘scapes’ which
constitute the shifting political terrain and endless
mobility of a ‘world in motion’:
 ethnoscapes: people in motion; migrants, tourists,
refugees
 mediascapes: media images of the world
 technoscapes: transborder communications
 finacescapes: global flows of capital
 ideoscapes: conflicts between state and non-state
ideologies
The key thing about these ‘scapes’ is that they show a
world in which it is not possible for economy, politics,
culture to fit together easily
It is the disjunctures between these elements that
facilitate global flows
Appaduarai points to a world of fragmentation and
uncertainty, but also to the imagining of new political
possibilities …
The importance of imagination
Imagination is the means by which individuals connect with new
global possibilities. Imagination is no longer:
•fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere)
•escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete
purposes and structures)
•an elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary
people)
Imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a
social fact, and is the key component of the new global order”
(Appadurai, 1996: 31)